Round Up of Reading

We were talking at our book group the other night about how nothing we've been reading lately has really grabbed us -- as if there's some sort of malaise or boring spirit hanging out for the last few weeks. So here's a grab bag of what I hope will lead me out of the wilderness.

• Our next pick is White Teeth, by Zadie Smith. I really liked her more recent novel On Beauty, a comic but poignant novel about two families striving for success in Ivy League academia. So I have high hopes for her debut novel about families in multicultural contemporary London.
• I read the introduction to New Stories from the South: 2007 -- The Year's Best, edited by Edward P. Jones, who wrote the remarkable novel The Known World. As a native Louisianian living in Florida, I like to think there's still some special connection between the South and literature. My fear is the connection is tenuous and loosening; perhaps this collection will renew my hope.
  
• I picked up an annotated edition of Spoon River Anthology. The introduction is excellent, but the notes tend toward the mundane, i.e. "This poem is based on Joe B. Blow, who Master's knew when he lived in ..." . I hate reading literature as secret code to the author's biography, matching up characters to people the author knew. That's got to be the most mundane, trivial way to read literature.
  
• For Christmas, I want a copy of the photography book Atchafalaya. I grew up on the lower Atchafalaya, which we called the Bayou Teche (pronounced Tesh). Hear that, Santa?